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Thursday, 9 January 2014

In this month's blog post, Dr Ian Miller, Wellcome Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University of Ulster, writes about domestic instruction and cookery classes in Irish schools in the early twentieth century.Deep concern about
declining nutritional health in Ireland emerged after the Famine. The potato
diet, despite the sustained criticism which it had been subjected to, had at
least granted the less affluent in Ireland access to a nutritious diet. Although
initially welcomed, its gradual replacement with a varied diet created new
food-related concerns. Criticism of the seemingly dismal culinary skills of the
Irish poor was rife. Working-class women across Ireland found themselves
subject to sustained criticism due to their apparent obsession with tea. Over-reliance
upon the substance was undoubtedly a symptom of post-Famine poverty and a lack
of access to a nutritious diet. Nonetheless, in the late nineteenth century individuals
rather than poverty tended to be blamed for poor personal and familial health. It
is against this backdrop that the idea that Irish schools could provide regular
domestic instruction gained currency.

Sisters of Charity Cookery Class, late 19th century.Image courtesy of National Library of Ireland. REF:P_WP_4616

Educational reform

At the turn of the
twentieth century, National School provision was limited. Cookery was offered
as an extra, optional subject from 1855. In 1884, it was offered by just fourteen
schools. This figure had risen dramatically by 1894 to fifty-five. Nonetheless,
the availability of cooking facilities failed to match this rising demand. National
schools tended not to have the luxuries of space or spare classrooms in which to
teach cookery. As Miss Coulter of Carrickfergus Model School lamented in 1899:

While the cookery classes are in
operation the smell pervades the whole department… there is only one small
gallery, I cannot dispense with it so, as soon as, the cookery lessons are
over, it must be used for the ordinary English classes. This is unhealthy for
the pupils and myself.

Cookery instruction
remained predominantly theoretical due to a lack of equipment and space. In
1895, one school inspector wrote that ‘in many parts of Connaught the people
are exceedingly poor, and it seemed strange to see grown girls fairly advanced
in grammar, geography, and arithmetic but left wholly unacquainted with plain
cookery, management of poultry, dairy management, &c’.

Arguments for
improved provision contained important gendered dimensions. The format of cookery
instruction proposed was essentially intended to train girls as housewives. For
instance, the Bishop of Limerick, Edward Thomas, asserted in 1900 that if Irish
women knew how to keep their homes bright and clean, and provided their
husbands with comfortable, savoury meals, then domestic happiness would ensue.
Similarly, the Irish Homestead argued
in 1898 that:

When a young artisan, when the time for
mating comes, chooses her or her comely face and bright spirits, none of this
knowledge [of cookery] or capacity does he find in his wife. The consequences
are disastrous to them both. How often does the working man in an Irish city,
when he gets up in the early morning, find that there is no appetising
breakfast in a cheery and tidy room prepared for him to start him on his day’s
work. The ever hospitable ‘pub’ is open, however, and, as the man must have
some nourishment, he turns in and takes ‘eating and drinking’ in the form of a
pint of stout. A day so begun is not calculated to develop and close
propitiously.

Restructuring education

Domestic education
reform was formally initiated in 1900. By July 1901, fifty-six teaching centres
had been formed across Ireland. During 1904, sixty-three domestic
instructresses delivered a total of 360 courses, with an average attendance of
forty-two pupils, complemented by 300 house visits. Courses of instruction
lasted for seven weeks, five of which were devoted to cookery and two to
laundry.

Nonetheless, upon
returning from training most teachers faced a dearth of funding which would
have allowed them to purchase utensils and materials. Many of them relied upon using
the facilities of convent schools. This restrictive scenario was condemned
throughout the echelons of educational administration. One senior inspector
insisted that ‘the want of funds will, I fear, prevent the introduction of
cookery and laundry work into the great majority of schools, unless the
Commissioners can see their way to make an equipment grant to each school’. To
clarify his point, he observed that only one school had been able to commence
cookery instruction in his city despite the training of fifteen teachers in the
previous year.

Miss Crowe and Mr Gildea with their pupils at Kilglass National School, Ahascragh, Co.Galway, c.1902.Image courtesy of National Library of Ireland. REF: CLON836

If space was
unavailable in schools, then it had to be sought elsewhere. In Kilkenny,
cookery classes were delivered in abandoned houses, rented rooms and cramped,
poorly ventilated converted dwelling houses. Throughout Co. Wexford, teaching
was undertaken in an array of unsuitable sites including unoccupied dwelling
homes, courthouses, a security room attached to a church, a stockroom, a spare
room in a disused mill, a joiner’s workshop, and even in barns and
coach-houses. In 1903, the Irish
Technical Journal asserted that ‘the pupils who attend regularly under
these conditions are heroes without knowing it. Neither the teachers nor the pupils,
however, can do the best work when their work is done in a vitiated
atmosphere’. The article was concluded by declaring: ‘it is absurd to give
courses of lectures on Hygiene in a ‘Black Hole’’.

It was only in 1907 that
the Chief Secretary of Ireland agreed to receive a deputation on the matter.
Reverend Father Dowling vociferously asserted at this:

If you preach technical instruction as
the cause of the economic salvation of the country and then point to an old
jail or some such building as the centre from whence this panacea of the wants
of Ireland were to come, it creates a bad impression.

And what of the
teaching itself? In 1903, one District School Inspector reported positively
that ‘the children are very fond of cookery, which, through the habits of
cleanliness and attention to details which it induces, is likely to have a
permanent beneficial effect on the social condition of the country’. In the
same year, Miss Fitzgerald confidently announced that parents were pleased with
the instruction of their children in cookery, adding that they considered it to
be ‘the most useful thing that has ever been taught, and will bring comfort to
our homes’.

Despite these sanguine
assertions, cookery instruction for younger pupils was not as encompassing as
originally hoped. Infants in the first class learnt only matters of personal
cleanliness and hygiene. Similarly, the second class was marked by an emphasis
on cleanliness, although students were taught how to prepare potatoes and
cabbage for cooking, the purposes of salt and how to toast bread. It was only
in the third class when pupils were actually allowed to cook their potatoes and
cabbage and to make colcannon, tea, coffee and cocoa, boiled eggs and fried
potatoes. Remaining years were devoted to more advanced, but useful, forms of
cookery involving bacon, sausages, mutton and beef.

The implementation
of cookery instruction ultimately failed to live up to its aspirations. The principle
that cookery instruction held high social value failed
to be met in Ireland with a corresponding allocation of material resources that
might have cemented that idyllic vision.

Podcast

Podcast of a lecture 'Reforming Diet in Post-Famine Ireland' by Dr. Ian Miller, given as part of the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI, UCD) Seminar Series, 2 February 2012

Ian Miller is a Wellcome Trust
Research Fellow in Medical Humanities at the Centre for the History of Medicine
in Ireland, University of Ulster. His publications includeA Modern History of the Stomach: Gastric
Illness, Medicine and British Society, 1800-1950 (London: Pickering and Chatto,
2011) and Reforming Food in Post-Famine Ireland: Medicine, Science and
Improvement c.1845-1922 (Manchester University Press, 2014). He is currently
co-editing a volume on medicine and war in twentieth-century Ireland with David
Durnin.